As a young boy, Frank Gallimore lived on 33 acres of
forestland in rural Oregon. His father was a social worker;
his mother stayed at home to teach her three children.
Their small red house sat next to a dilapidated barn that
the kids thought was haunted. When feeling brave, Frank and
his older brother, Jed, would crawl into the barn to catch
sight of the ghost-white owls flying around in the rafters.
The Gallimore children never ate meat, or watched
television, or listened to the radio. They spent their days
running and squealing around the woods and vegetable
garden, or swimming in the newt-filled pond, or collecting
eggs from a beady-eyed chicken in the backyard coop. The
hen's sole coopmate, a rooster, began each morning with a
hearty cockle-doodle-do.

But Frank was the only one who could hear it.

In that small country house, four out of the five residents
were deaf. They communicated in American Sign Language
(ASL), and other than an elderly couple across the road,
were rarely exposed to any spoken English. It wasn't until
the Gallimores moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, and the shy
7-year-old Frank enrolled in school, that he began the
difficult transition into the hearing world. Frank
struggled to fit in with the other students because,
compared to spoken languages, Sign Language places more
emphasis on body language, facial expressions, and eye
contact. He would wave at the other students to get their
attention, or tap them on the shoulder. And when his
teacher would scold, "That's not appropriate touching
behavior," Frank would ask why. But after just a few months
of interacting with other hearing children and going to
after-school speech lessons, Frank overcame his soft
stutter and learned English fluently.

Today, when the 27-year-old is asked, as he often is,
whether it was strange to grow up in such a quiet house, he
laughs. His deaf family was anything but quiet. They didn't
know when they were making noise, he explains, "so they'd
go through the kitchen banging on cabinets and pots and
pans" and loudly rustle the pages while reading a
newspaper. His sister, Rosa Lee, would blare Janet Jackson.
"She'd turn up her speakers really loud, put them down on
the floor to make the floors vibrate," he remembers, "and
she'd dance."

This spring, Gallimore completed his first year of the
Johns Hopkins MFA program in poetry. The boy who grew up in
a deaf world and took so late to English now produces poems
known for their sound. "Frank's poems," says fellow poetry
student Will Toedtman, "have a lilt to them that's really
sophisticated." One of Gallimore's former undergraduate
professors, Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett Hongo, praises
Gallimore's rich language, well-phrased lines, and
"interior music."

Provocative, too, is the message within these lyrical
lines. Not only is Gallimore the hearing son of deaf
parents, he is also the product of an interracial marriage
— his father is white and his mother is black. As
such, Gallimore straddles many cultures, and his poetry
tells the story of life at the intersection. His work
focuses on the deaf community he was raised in, a group
that shares a visual language that defines its identity and
its culture. The poems pay tribute to that culture which,
because of medical technologies that aim to eradicate
deafness, may be dying.

"One day," Gallimore says, "there won't be any deaf people
at all, there will be no deaf culture. My poetry is
dedicated to telling its story before they're gone."

Remember, he signs, your rook, your
knight, your king.
The volute figures glint and angle across
a checkered shawl
as if it were a dancefloor. My father's
fingers whisper
against each other with the accurate
elegance of legs.
Twist, turn, double back. The joints budge.
Remember. Remember. Remember. (Years
later,
something would drop in another room
and I would rise,
feeling the callus on my thumbs, to tell
my father
there was someone at the door. Though
there was no
mysterious visitor, and no one to sign it to.)
—From Three Poems (II)

"There are actually two components to being deaf,"
Gallimore says, "physiological and cultural." Physiological
deafness is the "disability" most hearing people recognize
— deaf people can't appreciate the strings of a
symphony, for instance, or talk on the telephone, or hear
an approaching car when they cross the street.

In the last two decades, modern medicine has created and
refined cochlear implants, which enable many deaf people to
hear. But for most deaf people, Gallimore says, deafness is
not a disability to be "fixed" but rather a minority
culture with a long social history and unique language.
Culture, he says, depends on language: "It all comes down
to how we communicate to each other, because that's how
history and tradition pass from one generation to the next;
it's what pulls a group of people together."

The American deaf community is united by its use of ASL.
"People tend to think it's based on English," Gallimore
says, "like Morse code. Like somebody sat down and said,
let's make up signs to match English. But it didn't happen
that way." ASL developed like any other organic language:
"Deaf people got together and started making up their own
signs, their own syntax, their own grammar, and it evolved
from there."

Frank Gallimore (left), with older siblings Rosa Lee and
Jed, at home in Dallas, Oregon.

Just like spoken languages, ASL has different "accents" in
different parts of the country. In spoken English, radio
and television facilitate the mixture of accents between
people in different regions, but the deaf have no such
means of overlap. ASL accents include the level of your
elbows, or where exactly your hands fall in the space
between your chest and chin, or how carefully you move your
fingers. "It's usually harder to understand signers on the
East Coast," Gallimore says. "They're more closed in, and
much faster. A lot of the signs are on the fly instead of
completely executed. It's like an English speaker who slurs
over a lot of words."

ASL creates a cultural identity like spoken language, too,
with its own modes of inclusion and exclusion, Gallimore
says. "There are certain behaviors where if you exhibit
them it means 'OK, you're one of us'" — like keeping
eye contact during conversation, and using more subtle
facial expressions. When deaf people greet each other, they
don't shake hands but hug. And because of a long history of
American deaf people working in factories, isolated from
other signers, the deaf also tend to talk for a lot longer
than the hearing. "There's an expectation to tell a story,"
Gallimore says. "When a deaf person says, 'how are you?'
you don't say, 'I'm fine.' They want to hear the story of
your day, which is why their conversations tend to go on
forever."

This history makes the deaf a community of storytellers,
telling tales the hearing world will never know, Gallimore
says. "It saddens me to think of all the deaf Shakespeares
out there who will never be recognized by the rest of the
world."

Gallimore was not born physiologically deaf, but his first
language was ASL. It wasn't until he started school that he
realized he wasn't deaf like the rest of his family. "It
was hard for me to understand what it meant to be hearing,"
he says. The label "deaf," for Gallimore, "was the same
thing as saying your family's American, or your family's
black." When people told him, "but you're hearing,"
Gallimore didn't understand the distinction. "I'd say, no,
how can they be deaf and I'm not? They're my family —
I'm the same thing as they are."

Around that time, Gallimore says his brother, Jed, had "a
big chip on his shoulder" because he had trouble with
English. Their mother, Laurene Simms, today is an associate
professor of education at Gallaudet University in
Washington, D.C., the world's only university for the deaf.
(In fact, she was the first black deaf woman to earn a
doctorate.) She says deaf children struggle with English
just as English speakers might struggle with spoken French
if they'd never heard it. "Deaf kids don't have access to
the English language every day like hearing children do,"
she explains. "But they can get some access — like
reading English books or watching TV captioning — and
then they can learn it. And some are very successful."

Her son Jed's poor English skills only motivated him to
study it more, and he's now a novelist. With his big
brother's nose constantly in a book, Gallimore also took
interest. "I wanted to be just like him," he laughs,
"because I was little brother Frank. So I started reading,
too."

"Frank was always creative," Simms remembers. "Even before
he started speaking, he would play with his signs,
dramatize, and draw pictures — but he really took off
when he started using English."

For the next few years, Gallimore says, "I started to
finally come to terms with the fact that I was a hearing
person, and not like the rest of my family." As he
acclimated to the hearing world, he began to notice small
changes in the way he communicated. "I'd come home to my
deaf family and start to behave differently in my body
language and in my eye contact," he recalls. His parents
noticed, and Gallimore says he always felt they were a
little bit disappointed, "like they were losing me in some
way." And Gallimore felt guilty. "I always wanted to be as
deaf as possible, to fit in with my family," he says.

At seventeen, just beginning to write,
I was alone with the confusion of myself.
At twenty-two, I can still see,
outside, rattling loosely left to right
into tunnels and backland, boxcars
chased by dogs, slicing mist into the
rain.
Is there nothing so different now
than when I couldn't take it anymore,
walking from the tent into the storm,
the city miles away, and the thought of
you
coming apart in a cold and doubtful
wind?
—From Raintime Over Dog-Boy

Gallimore attended the University of Oregon. While there,
separated from deaf people and deaf culture, he began to
develop his own identity, one of black and white, deaf and
hearing. "That's a lot to juggle," he says, "always acutely
aware of being all of those things and yet none of them."
He quotes lines from one of his favorite poems, Derek
Walcott's Schooner Flight: "I had a sound colonial
education, / I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and
either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation." Gallimore says that
that ambivalence is felt in some way by most Americans and
is behind every one of his poems. "As Americans, we're
quite familiar with the shock of looking at one's parents
and not quite seeing oneself in the picture," he says. "One
realizes the disconnect between himself or herself and the
past — and history becomes less continuous and more
distant, untouchable as a constellation."

An English major, Gallimore was one of two undergraduates
to take Garrett Hongo's traditional meter and forms
graduate workshop at Oregon. Though the professor's
reputation was intimidating at first, Gallimore gradually
looked to him as a mentor. "He was very encouraging about
my writing," he recalls. "He gave me tips on it, and told
me to keep working on it."

Unlike most undergraduates' work, Gallimore's "wasn't
cryptic or evasive or juvenile," Hongo says. "He had a
finish to it, a sense of creating a sound of language, and
I always appreciated that. It wasn't just words thrown on a
page — there was an interior music."

With Hongo's encouragement, Gallimore says he "finally got
serious about poetry" in his last year of college. He often
walked by the on-campus coffee house to listen to its
weekly poetry slams, and one day decided to try it. "I
thought doing open-mike poetry every week, every Monday,
would be a way to keep myself writing," he says. As a
senior, he wrote and performed three poems a week. "It
created a kind of expectation after a while," he says.
"Everyone would be like, 'Oh, there's Frank again.'"

"Deaf culture is probably going the way of the
dinosaurs, and I'm not happy about it. I want my poems to
show the beauty of deafness and not just the disability of
it."

Gallimore considers sound to be a crucial element in his
writing, and says that not being able to share it with his
deaf family has been frustrating. However, on one occasion,
his mother and sister did come to a slam. Gallimore had
given the poems to an interpreter beforehand. "There's no
way to interpret a poem well," he says. "It was more that
they were proud of me, because I was always a shy kid. I
got a standing ovation, and I remember looking over and
they were crying."

"It was wonderful," his mother remembers. "Because he grew
up in deaf culture, where you use your body language and
facial expressions so much, his performance incorporated
that with his voice."

Gallimore's mother and sister weren't the only ones who
enjoyed his energetic performances. Toward the end of one
semester, he won three competitions in a row. But
eventually, the thrill of the stage wore off. "I enjoyed it
for a while," Gallimore says, "until I realized I was
writing more for the applause and dramatic effect than I
was for the actual depth. I didn't feel like I was growing
anymore, I was just performing."

Gallimore decided to transition then, from slam-style
poetry to a kind that is "more readable on paper, and not
so dependent on performance." He entered a few of these new
poems, including Poem to the Son I Do Not Have, into
the Kidd Memorial Writing Competition at the University of
Oregon and won first place. The poem also received
honorable mention in the Atlantic Monthly 2000
Student Writing Competition. In retrospect, Gallimore says,
Poem to the Son I Do Not Have "reads a little
heavy-handed to me, a little sentimental. But the feeling
behind it was real and still is, that sense of being at the
end of something, of moving, traveling out of one familiar
terrain and into what can't quite be described as a new
world so much as it is a state of flux, of mid-motion, of
being in between or not quite arriving. That's the
condition of many people of mixed heritage."

Gallimore believes deaf culture is dying mostly because of
the rise in cochlear implant surgeries. Though cochlear
implants have been around for more than 20 years, their use
in children has skyrocketed since 2001, when the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration approved them for children as young
as 12 months. In 1995, 95 implant operations were performed
in the United States on children under the age of 3. By
2004, that number rose to 662, with 369 more surgeries done
on kids between the age of 3 and 5. Overall, the National
Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
(NIDCD) estimates that 13,000 adults and 10,000 children
have cochlear implants today. (Approximately 900,000
functionally deaf people live in the United States.) "Deaf
culture is probably going the way of the dinosaurs, and I'm
not happy about it," Gallimore says. "I want my poems to
show the beauty of deafness and not just the disability of
it."

Gallimore explains how Poem to the Son I Do Not Have
underscores this cause: "I don't know that deaf culture
will die. It may not. It may adapt and evolve, as so many
other cultures have. But I have serious doubts about this,
which is why that poem ends rather ambiguously. History, in
many respects, is a kind of junkyard, and deaf culture
could very easily become one more of its disregarded
artifacts. This is something I'm resisting fervently, which
is why the poem struggles to imagine a son, a future, that
it indeed does not have, and why it urges this son to
believe in beauty, to hold on to — to remember
— what is being lost."

Gallimore knew he loved to write, but at the time of his
college graduation, he wanted to write comic books. So he
moved to San Diego, the U.S. hub for comic book writers,
and for the next year tried to make a living selling comics
and doing freelance commercial art. He made very little
money, and eventually turned to teaching, though he
continues to make comics for the newsletter of Kids of Deaf
Adults (KODA).

After a year of low cash flow, Gallimore found steady work
teaching ASL at the University of California, San Diego and
working as an ASL interpreter for a relay service. After
the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, the
government provided all deaf Americans with video phones,
which can be used with a telephone relay service to
communicate with hearing people. If a deaf person wanted to
order a pizza, for example, he or she would call the relay
service and sign the order over the videophone to an
interpreter, and the interpreter would relay the order to
the pizza place. (Gallimore's mother was interviewed for
this article using a phone relay service.) Gallimore also
did freelance signing — things like going with deaf
people to their doctor's office, or translating college
lectures.

"But then I got tired," Gallimore says. "I was at a point
where I was making enough money to stay in that position
for the rest of my life, making a decent living just doing
the same thing." He had other ambitions, including
improving his technique in the Brazilian martial art of
Capoeira. He moved to Washington, D.C., worked as an
interpreter to save some money, learned a handful of
Portuguese phrases — "I'm an American," and "Excuse
me" — and moved to Brazil without knowing a soul. "I
went to find out if Capoeira was my number one obsession."
In case it wasn't, before leaving the States he applied to
the Johns Hopkins poetry program. In May of last year
— four months into the Brazil stint — he got an
e-mail notifying him of his acceptance. He moved to
Baltimore in August.

Last fall, Gallimore took a poetic forms graduate workshop
with poet Greg Williamson, a senior lecturer in the Johns
Hopkins Writing Seminars. Williamson says Gallimore "really
took the opportunity to experiment with a lot of different
kinds of poetic styles and voices and subject matter, and
from week to week, really challenged himself to take on
some kind of new thing." Williamson remembers one poem in
particular about cochlear implants: "While most of us
might, sort of blinded, unequivocally think they're a good
thing, Frank raised the point that it's not necessarily a
good thing. His overarching concern is that the culture
— folk tales, sign language, whole histories —
would be lost." This surprising idea "was something that
arrested everyone in the class," Williamson says, "and
certainly me."

The flood will have us soon and give us
back,
as children go and die within their
names,
the moving mind, complicit, moving on
with currents pushing northward through
the heart,
the fogged dock slowly dwindling in
the flood, the past still rising up the
verge
to find its way into our separate lives.
—From Flood After Flood

Nine out of 10 deaf children are born to parents who can
hear, according to the NIDCD. If a deaf child isn't exposed
to a "base language" from an early age, his or her language
development will be severely delayed, says Simms,
Gallimore's mother. "The base language means understanding
what the environment is," she says. "Understanding
communication, colors, numbers, trees, animals, questions,
answers — that's all basic for children. Once they
have a foundation, they can jump to a second
language."

"Did I ever wish I was deaf? Hell, yes. I wished that
for most of my life. For most of my childhood, I thought
the whole hearing world was for the birds."

The problem, Simms says, is that most hearing parents are
scared when they find out their child has a "disability"
and are encouraged by their doctors and nurses to consider
cochlear implants. "If they're heartbroken, they're upset,
they'll try speech therapy and cochlear implants," she
says. "But that's really not the answer." While the child
is getting an implant, a critical window of opportunity for
learning sign language fluently could be lost," she
asserts.

Simms' own story shows the importance of early language
acquisition. She went deaf when she was a baby, before the
age of the cochlear implant, as a side effect of polio. Her
parents never learned to sign, leaving her socially
isolated from them and her seven siblings. "Nobody
communicated with her; she sort of sat in the corner,"
Gallimore says. When she was very young, she was even
declared mentally retarded.

"But then she went to school and turned out to be very
smart," he says, "and they realized, 'Oh, it's just because
nobody talks to her.'" Simms went on to get her doctorate
in language, reading, and culture. "She's pretty much
devoted her life to trying to change deaf education,"
Gallimore says.

Gallimore now has mixed opinions about cochlear implants.
He used to think they were abominable, killers of his
native culture. But in recent years, he has changed his
mind. "I recognize that it's inevitable, that deafness
itself will eventually become obsolete. And I wouldn't
blame a deaf person for wanting to be in the hearing
world."

Gallimore does have some mild hearing loss in his right ear
and knows he may — like one of his uncles —
lose his hearing completely in middle age. If that
happened, he would get a cochlear implant, "primarily
because I've become so accustomed to hearing and because I
love the sounds of poetry and music," he says. But deaf
culture always has been and always will be a huge part of
his identity. If the children he hopes for in the future
are born deaf — which is fairly likely, as his father
was a fourth-generation deaf — Gallimore wouldn't
give them a cochlear implant. For one thing, he reasons, "I
don't think it's right to make such an important decision
for a baby, before he or she can decide for themselves."
Moreover, his family would take it as an affront, he says,
"as if I was ashamed of our history."

But this couldn't be further from the truth.

"Did I ever wish I was deaf?" he says. "Hell, yes. I wished
that for most of my life. For most of my childhood, I
thought the whole hearing world was for the birds and felt
it was some kind of cruel joke that I was so unfortunate to
be born a member of it. I always believed, and in some ways
still believe, that the deaf world was so much more vivid,
expansive, and beautiful than the hearing one. There is
something about the way deaf people 'see' that is
incredibly profound. In comparison, hearing people always
seem rather nearsighted."

Virginia Hughes is the magazine's 2006 Corbin Gwaltney
Fellow.

Poem to the Son I Do Not Have — An
Excerpt

The rooms have gone quiet as a failed heart.
At the end of eighty years, the body of my deaf
Grandfather crashed like leaves, crashed after dancing
In the home yard, signing with trees, before God
Or a cloud, great and useless, raised the earth
With snow. I am here on deranged soil.
It is built of bone and husks of leather.
It is built of nocturnal dust,
Broken shucks of feathered skin, jawless
Skull-sockets and dried femurs and all
The memorabilia of the ghost-inhabited trees.
In 1981, the Buick engine
Sputters on the roadside. A long chain
At the end of a white truck heaves it up
And out from the hood and something is shimmering in the
air.
A plane, bright as the sun, glides in the sun
Like a sparrow's dream. The mechanic, dressed in oil
And gray, hunched over his bucket engrossed
With ratchets, misses it. And my father in the oil-flecked
bathroom,
Clearing his face in ivory lumps of foam,
Misses it. Shimmer again as it dies past
A thread of dusk. I hear the razor tap,
Imagine hairs flaked into the yellow drain,
The pull of the famished blade against my father's
Cheek, trace the curled lip I inherited,
The deaf ears I did not. Does it matter,
Father, that I cried, you sliding
Forward twice the saw of your right
Thick-fingered hand across your
left palm, which means it's all right,
It's all right? Two fingers now,
For you, for me, back and forth, you
And me. You and me can go, he said,
One hand flat against the other
And sliding off into the air. You
And me can go together. Two fists
Together like twin doves. Together. I
Would like to have told you to have faith in beauty
For otherwise it does not exist.
1981 and arthritic
Doors lay bent and rusted over, a crust
Of red cradled in broken hinges, itinerant
Leaves skidding across indifferent steel
And out of memory. The sound was almost
Like the breathing of the interstate,
Almost like the sea.—Frank Gallimore